1278: Stress in Language Jun 10, 2018

Although there are ways to predict the stress on a syllable from phonology, a lot of that process also comes from the conventions of the language itself. In a 3-syllable hypothetical word that existed in Finnish, French, and Hebrew, it is extremely likely that the stress would be on the first, second, and third syllable respectively, because this is how those languages place stress in a polysyllabic word most of the time. In fact, this is less predictable in English, but because it is often the case that the words from Old English are stressed on the first syllable today, whereas those deriving from Old French or Latin will be stressed on the second syllable. The reasons why a language will have this stress-pattern is not exactly clear.